


Know Thyself

by anthologia



Category: I Am Number Four (2011), The Lorien Legacies - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Child Abuse, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-09
Updated: 2013-02-09
Packaged: 2017-11-28 18:36:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/677556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anthologia/pseuds/anthologia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam Goode learned early on what kind of girl she is and is not.</p>
<p>(Minor warnings for mention of skeevy adult-hitting-on-minor and child abuse.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Know Thyself

Sam Goode learned early on what kind of girl she is and is not.  
  
At five, she learned she likes aliens better than princesses and how to make her dad pick her up and show her the constellations by opening her eyes really wide and pouting at him long enough. She learned the best places to hide the fluffy dresses her mom bought her and how to turn her Barbie doll into a new species with a liberal application of blue paint. (Also, she learned that she wasn’t supposed to touch the paint, any color of paint, unless mommy or daddy was supervising.)  
  
At six, she learned the colors, and how to let go of her blanket, and why the sky is blue, and how to say _please_ and _thank you_ in French, and that her mom never really wanted to live in Paradise so why the hell did he _bring_ her here, would he answer her _that_? (And then her mom got very quiet and her dad said _go back to bed, Snippet_ but the next day when she asked Suzie’s mom what _I’m not your goddamn slave_ meant, she didn’t get to eat any cookies.)  
  
At seven, she learned numbers and letters and what happens to a goldfish after it dies. And she learned she's the kind of girl whose dad goes away.  
  
The kind everyone thinks is crazy because she keeps the sheriff on speed dial even after her mom stops asking for updates. The kind that becomes the town joke and the town basket case and the town weirdo, the one everyone tuts at sadly because she’s really just so determined to live in denial and isn’t it a shame? And Sam learned to ignore them, because she’s always too busy anyway, smuggling her dad’s things into her room when her mom tries to get rid of them or hauling a telescope out onto the roof at night so she can search for anomalies in the sky or scouring through disreputable texts on aliens looking for evidence that her dad is still alive.  
  
That’s the way it works for four years. Her mom pulls long hours at the hospital and stops paying attention to her in the hopes that she’ll somehow magically become less of a freak if she isn't encouraged. Instead, she starts wearing her dad’s old shirts to school and tapes up his glasses so they’ll fit on her face.  
  
Then, one day, she comes home from school and finds her mom making out on the couch with some guy she doesn’t recognize. She wants to run away or scream or go to a friend’s house and refuse to return until her mom gets rid of him, but she doesn’t have friends or anywhere to run to and anyway, screaming’s kind of stupid. So instead she hunches up her shoulders and slips into her room to study theory on the possibility of special disturbances being responsible for missing persons. They don’t even notice she was there.  
  
After that first time, more follow, way more than she’d like to remember. There’s Daniel, who smells too strongly of aftershave and thinks her name’s Cam; James, who didn’t even know she existed until she wandered downstairs for breakfast when he was drinking coffee in his boxers; Ben, who calls her ‘Sport’ and treats her like an escaped mental patient; and Mike, who tells her quite frankly over donuts that he thinks she’s a freak and quite possibly retarded, and that her mom's a goddamn saint for even putting up with her.  
  
Around the same time, her fellow classmates decide to graduate from unimaginative ostracism to minor annoyances and creative bullying. Mark, the son of the sheriff, takes particular glee in making her school life miserable, running the gamut from stealing her _(his)_ glasses to tripping her in the hallways to particularly vicious bruises at any sporting opportunity. (Her mother advises her that he’s probably just acting out because he doesn’t know how to express that he likes her; Sam thinks that’s the most idiotic thing she’s ever heard, and he’s probably just a nimrod who hates nonconformity paired with a unhealthy dose of anger at the weird girl who kept calling his dad all throughout their childhoods. Not that it ever did her much good.  
  
Sam is not the kind of girl boys ask out.)  
  
(But once, when her mom was at the hospital working a double night shift, the boyfriend of the week fixed her eggs and put his hand on her thigh, and she learned that she is the kind of girl creepy guys almost three times her age hit on.  
  
Afterwards, he had to have his hand in a bandage for a month because he mysteriously managed to dig a piece of glass in so deep he almost severed an artery, and then he moved and she never heard from him again. But the incident wizened her up to the reality that she’s a mostly defenseless teenage girl with a serial dater for a mom who barely ever pays attention to what’s going on at home. So she stopped showering as much as she should have and wore her dad’s increasingly grungy t-shirts until her mom threatened to throw out her wardrobe and hose her down every morning. During that period, the bullying got worse and she smelled horrible, but no one tried to hit on her again.)  
  
It’s not until John Smith moves to Paradise that she even regrets not being the kind of girl who dates even a little bit. He’s blond and muscled and reminds her of one of the young god-heroes she’s read about on the few occasions she’s bothered with mythology. Which, actually, says a lot on its own, because prior to his arrival, Sam was not anything like the kind of girl who would describe a boy as looking like a young god, nor would she ever consider that necessarily to be a good thing what with the whole godly tendency towards screwing over the lives of mortals.  
  
(He does, though. Look like one. Not that she’s spent an inordinate amount of time watching him or anything.)  
  
Of course, she knows that no matter what stupid, cliché’d thoughts she might have about him when sneaking glances in his direction from behind her algebra book, this does not make any ultimate difference in the grand scheme of things. She still finds her clothes in the toilet after gym class, Mark still shoves her into her locker so hard she gets a bruise on the side of her head, and, most importantly, she’s still Sam Goode, Professional Social Pariah. So it shouldn’t matter when she notices him talking to Sarah a lot, who once tripped her so hard during a P.E. run that she sprained an ankle and had to hobble around on crutches for a month. Except it does, because she can handle him getting popular and having a girlfriend and all that crap, but something deep inside is going to crack if he joins the national sport of Making Sam’s Life Hell. So when she sees Mark and his douchefriends pointing to him during lunch, she knows what she has to do.  
  
She sets her tray next to him at lunch. He glances up, probably wondering if being joined by the school loser freak means he’s about to be dragged down to her level of the social ladder by association, so she decides to make it brief. “Look,” she says, “you’re new here, but I’ll fill you in. Sarah is Mark’s ex – he’s the one who always acts like someone personally affronted his dog – and he’s really, really good at holding a grudge and thinks anyone who ever associated with his lips belongs to him for life, so he’s probably going to do something stupid and painful to try to warn you off. I just thought you should know.”  
  
He stares at her like she’s the new exhibit at a zoo. “Thanks.”  
  
“No problem.“ She shrugs, and is already in the process of standing when a meatball hits her in the back of the head. A second later, another one lands on John’s cheek with a squelchy smack.  
  
“So,” John says as he wipes meat sauce off his face. “Warn me off, huh?”  
  
(A day later, she finds him at her locker, wrinkling his nose at the particularly heady smell of manure emanating from within. Thankfully, she’s long-since learned not to keep anything particularly valuable in her locker. She raises her eyebrows at him. “Lost?”  
  
“I think something’s in your locker,” he says, and she can’t help but let out a bitter laugh at that.  
  
“No kidding.”)  
  
In the following weeks, she learns a few things about what kind of boy John is. He smiles at her in the hallway, even though nobody else will. He stops to help her gather her stuff after someone knocks them out of her arms and doesn’t make any snide remarks about her books even when he realizes almost all of them are about extraterrestrials. And he’s still hanging out with Sarah.  
  
Which is fine, she figures, because she’s still not the kind of girl guys ask out. She is, however (Sam learns), the kind of girl who will nurse a crush on the person who is rapidly becoming her only friend in the town, just because he’s nice and stands up for her to Mark and has that whole body of a young god thing going. Which is to say, the pathetic kind of girl who doesn’t stand a chance. Especially since there's that whole thing when Mark decides to top his previous record for being a nimrod by kidnapping Sarah and John during the Halloween hayride, and she sort of has a minor breakdown and points a gun at John, so she’s pretty sure she’ll basically never be seeing him again except crossing in the hallway as far away as possible, even if he did seem weirdly cool with it at the time.  
  
But, you know, Sam is the kind of girl who’s just a freak. So when John sits next to her at lunch and asks, “So did you use to date Mark or one of his friends or something?” she spits out an entire mouthful of Coke and receives a standing ovation for the show from everyone within a five table radius.  
  
“You’re kidding, right?”  
  
He shrugs, and she is struck again by how completely freaking _weird_ it is that he’s bothering to talk to her at all after that whole thing with her going crazy and accusing him of being an alien. “Well, they never seem to leave you alone – “  
  
“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m kind of a freak,” she points out.  
  
“ – And I guess I wanted to know if you went out with one of them. Or anyone.”  
  
She glances down for a second, trying to figure out if this is some kind of revenge – mock the loser by rubbing it in that she’s never even had a date – or if he’s just bringing it up for some kind of twisted entertainment. The movement is unfortunate in that she finds herself staring down at an overlarge boys’ sized gray NASA t-shirt that you couldn’t find her breasts under if you tried paired with washed-out jeans and sneakers covered in the remnants of a years’ worth of mud, and any doubt she may have entertained vanishes in a split-second. “Do I _look_ like I’ve ever had a date?”  
  
Before he can say anything and twist the blade in deeper, she goes on damage control and abandons her seat so fast you’d think it was on fire. He grabs her arm, but years of near-constant bullying have given her excellent dodging reflexes, and she slips away from him.  
  
For once in her life, she’s happy not to share too many classes with John, and she manages to get through the day without any more confrontations. Her mom’s not home (again), so she doesn’t have to worry about having to suffer the painfully obvious vacuum of parental concern. Instead, she holes up in her room with _They Walk Among Us_ and algebra homework and hunkers down for the night while pointedly not thinking about blond guys with the kind of disconcertingly brilliant smile you just can’t ignore, even if you really, really try. At least, until the doorbell rings.  
  
She almost doesn't answer, except that she sees John through the peephole, and she really can't bring herself to pretend not to be home for him. So she doesn't.  
  
“Look,” he says all in a rush as soon as the door opens, “I don’t really know what happened, but I only wanted to know because I wanted forewarning if I was going to get hit by more meatballs if I asked you out.”  
  
Sam is not the kind of girl boys ask out.  
  
“And I guess I said that all wrong, but I wasn’t really sure how to bring it up without actually saying it outright. I’m sorry I made you upset.”  
  
She’s not even the kind of girl people apologize to, in all honesty.  
  
“So I understand if you don’t want to, but I guess I’m trying to say now that I’d really like to go out with you sometime.”  
  
She’s learned this through painful trial and error, and she’d be stupid to abandon all that empirical evidence now.  
  
Except, he shifts his weight from one foot to the other and stares at her nervously and says, “Also, I’d like to kiss you.”  
  
“Why?”  
  
(She’d be really, _really_ stupid to abandon it now.)  
  
He actually takes the time to consider it, almost twenty seconds just spent staring a little to her right before he says, “Because you’re amazing.”  
  
“Oh,” she says.  
  
And as he dips his head down to touch his lips to hers, she guesses she might be that kind of girl, after all.


End file.
